Arcadia Public Library

Sixteen-year-old Linus Weems, a street person since leaving his wealthy father's home, is kidnapped and taken to an underground bunker where he is soon joined by five others, ranging in age from nine to seventy, who are alternately cared for and tortured by their unseen captor.

After rescuing an adolescent girl from the sea, researchers learn she has been raised by dolphins and attempt to rehabilitate her to the human world. At the age of four, Mila fell from a refugee craft and was lost in the ocean between Cuba and Florida. Until her rescue eight years later, she lived as a wild child of the sea. As Mila now learns to communicate and deal with the complexities of human feelings, she develops an understanding of a strange...

A stark, elegiac account of unexpected pleasures and the progress of seasons. Fifteen years ago, Kathryn Scanlan found a stranger's five-year diary at an estate auction in a small town in Illinois. The owner of the diary was eighty-six years old when she began recording the details of her life in the small book, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. The diary was falling apart -- water-stained and illegible in places -- but magnetic to Scanlan...

"Year of the Fat Knight is Antony Sher's account -- splendidly supplemented by his own paintings and sketches -- of researching, rehearsing and performing one of Shakespeare's best-known and most popular characters. He tells us how he had doubts about playing the part at all, how he sought to reconcile Falstaff's obesity, drunkenness, cowardice and charm, how he wrestled with the fat suit needed to bulk him up, and how he explored the complexities...

Greg records his sixth grade experiences in a middle school where he and his best friend, Rowley, undersized weaklings amid boys who need to shave twice daily, hope just to survive, but when Rowley grows more popular, Greg must take drastic measures to save their friendship.

Twelve-year-old Paul, who lives in the shadow of his football hero brother Erik, fights for the right to play soccer despite his near blindness and slowly begins to remember the incident that damaged his eyesight.

In his diary, a wombat describes his life of eating, sleeping, and getting to know some new human neighbors.

In the latest diary of middle-schooler Greg Heffley, he records his attempts to spend his summer vacation sensibly indoors playing video games and watching television, despite his mother's other ideas.

"When Mouse's dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be? Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is packed to the gills with useless garbage. That would be horros enough, but there's more. Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather's journal, which at first seems to be the ravings of a broken mind. Until she encounters some of the terrifying things he described herself. Alone...

The notes written by a Jewish playwright/journalist while in the Lodz ghetto from 1942 to 1944.